Scholarship on Phil 2:6–11 has long wrestled with the question of “interpretive staging.” While acknowledging that Jewish sapiential and apocalyptic literature as well as Roman apotheosis narratives provide important matrices for the hymn, the following study pinpoints a third backdrop against which Paul\u27s dramatic christology would have been heard in Philippi: Euripidean tragedy. Echoes of Dionysus\u27s opening monologue from Euripides\u27s Bacchae in the carmen Christi suggest that Roman hearers of Paul\u27s letter likely understood Christ\u27s kenotic metamorphosis as a species of Dionysian revelation. This interpretive recognition accomplishes a new integration of the hymn\u27s Jewish and imperial-cultic transcripts. Jesus\u27s Bacchic portraiture supports a theology of Christ\u27s pre-existence, while simultaneously establishing him as a Dionysian antithesis to the imperial Apollonian kyrios Caesar. These Dionysian echoes also elevate the status of slaves and women, and suggest that “the tragic” remains modally present within the otherwise comic fabula of the Christ myth
